``Reckless Disregard for the Truth'' -- The Case of John Demanjuk

The Testimony of Yoram Sheftel.

Printed in the American Almanac, July 6,
1998.

Among the three classes of cases which
must be brought before the U.S.
Congress, in hearings on the pattern of
systematic prosecutorial abuse by the
permanent bureaucracy at the U.S.
Department of Justice, are those
carried out by the so-called Office of
Special Investigations (OSI), the
so-called ``Nazi-hunters.'' Two of
these cases--the one brought against
former Austrian President Kurt Waldheim
and the one against Ukrainian-American
autoworker John Demjanjuk--were
presented at the Independent Hearings
to Investigate Misconduct by the U.S.
Department of Justice, held with the
aid of the Schiller Institute, in the
early fall of 1995.

The other two classes are the
cases against African-American
politicians, known as ``Operation
Fruehmenschen,'' and those against
associates of prominent U.S. statesman
Lyndon LaRouche.

There is one respect in which the
Demjanjuk case is the most damning of
the three. For it was this case in
which a U.S. Court of Appeals found
that the Justice Department carried out
an outrageous, and nearly fatal, fraud
on the court. Yet, to this very day,
the Department of Justice, all the way
up to Attorney General Janet Reno
herself, has continued to defend the
OSI's misconduct, and sought to reverse
John Demjanjuk's right to live as a
U.S. citizen in this country.

- An Unambiguous Ruling -

The testimony by Demjanjuk's
Israeli lawyer before the Independent
Commission is included in full below.
We pick up the tale where Mr. Sheftel
leaves off.

It was not until Demjanjuk was
appealing his death sentence in Israel
before the Israeli Supreme Court, that
the evidence came into the public that
he was not Ivan the Terrible. In the
early summer of 1992, the Sixth Circuit
Court of Appeal ordered a review of the
case, and appointed a Special Master,
Judge Thomas Wiseman, to supervise the
review.

While Judge Wiseman was carrying
out his review, the Israeli Supreme
Court--on July 29, 1993--acquitted
Demjanjuk, thus sparing his life and
creating the situation where he could
be freed.

As a result of the Wiseman
investigation, on Nov. 17, 1993, the
Federal Court of Appeals for the 6th
Circuit issued its decision. Among its
findings:

``The OSI attorneys acted
with reckless disregard for their duty
to the court, and their discovery
obligations in failing to disclose at
least three sets of documents in their
possession, before the proceedings
against Demjanjuk ever reached trial.''

The court concluded:

``Thus, we
hold that the OSI attorneys acted with
reckless disregard for the truth, and
for the government obligation to take
no steps that prevent an adversary from
presenting his case fully and fairly.
This was fraud on the court in the
circumstances of this case.

``And finally, as a result of all
this, for the reasons set out herein,
we vacate the judgment of the District
court, and the judgment of this court,
in the extradition proceedings on the
grounds that the judgments were wrongly
procured, as the result of the
prosecutorial misconduct that
constituted fraud on the court.''

Despite efforts by the DOJ to get
a review of the Sixth Circuit decision,
it was unsuccessful. On Oct. 3, 1994,
the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a
Justice Department appeal of the Sixth
Circuit's ruling. Eventually, Demjanjuk
was allowed to return to the U.S., and
in early 1998, had his citizenship
reinstated.

Despite all of this, Attorney
General Reno, at the urging of Mark
Richard and other Criminal Division
bureaucrats, is, to this day, pursuing
a new denaturalization case against
Demjanjuk. Does this case not show that
the Department of Justice cannot be
trusted to enforce its own standards?

- The Case of John Demjanjuk -
- Testimony of Yoram Sheftel -

My name is Yoram Sheftel, and I've been
practicing for 19 years as a criminal
lawyer in the state of Israel. I
defended about 800 cases. We do not
have jury trials in Israel; but like
jury trials, cases are taken to the
floor for evidence. And in 1986, I
joined the defense team of John
Demjanjuk. Two years later, when the
appeal proceedings started, I was left
alone in this case. For five years, I
was conducting the entire appeal
proceedings of John Demjanjuk in the
state of Israel, and I was also
involved--although not appearing in
court--in all the proceedings which
took place in the U.S.A. from 1987
onwards. As the result of this, on July
29, 1993, Demjanjuk was found
unanimously not guilty by the Israeli
Supreme Court. And, about two and a
half months later, the U.S. Federal
Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit
decided that the extradition of
Demjanjuk to the state of Israel was a
product of fraud upon the courts in the
U.S.

I will in my presentation, focus
on that case; but specifically, I will
focus on the misconduct of the Office
of Special Investigations, a branch of
the Department of Justice in the United
States.

The Demjanjuk affair started as a
Soviet plot in the very beginning of
1976, through a Soviet crony named
Michael Hanushak. Hanushak was an
editor of a Ukrainian communist
newspaper published in New York, the
Ukrainian Daily News. The affair began
with an attempt to implicate Demjanjuk
as a guard in the notorious death camp
of Sobibor. Sobibor was a death camp,
where between spring of 1942 and autumn
of 1943, 600,000 Jews were slaughtered,
in front of the allies, who knew
exactly what was happening, and who
didn't lift a finger to save even one
Jewish child from the holocaust, which
took place in Sobibor.

The allegations were that
Demjanjuk was a guard in that death
camp. This was the Soviet plot in the
Demjanjuk affair.

A few months later, in the state
of Israel, an extremely suggestive
photo spread was shown to Israeli
holocaust survivors, mainly from
Sobibor and Treblinka. Demjanjuk was
wrongly identified as ``Ivan the
Terrible'' from the death camp of
Treblinka, a death camp where between
the July 27, 1942 and August 2, 1943,
870,000 Jews were slaughtered.

The Showtrial Begins

Ten years later, this case of
mistaken identity case deterioriated,
in the state of Israel, to one of the
worst showtrials of the century.
Demjanjuk was tried in a theater hall,
in the one and only ever televised case
in the history of the land. The
television was invited by the court and
the prosecution. And, at the end of
these proceedings, on April 25, 1988,
as everyone could have anticipated when
they began, Demjanjuk was sentenced to
death.

The Demjanjuk affair became one of
the worst cases of coverup in modern
history. This was due to the enormous,
unprecedented misconduct of the U.S.
Department of Justice, and, most
specifically, its Office of Special
Investigations.

The lawsuit to revoke Demjanjuk's
American citizenship, was brought to
the Cleveland federal court, in
September 1977. Although the sole
evidence against Demjanjuk was
identification from an extremely
suggestive photo spread, there was no
doubt that the Justice Department
genuinely did believe in September 1977
that Demjanjuk was that monster from
Treblinka, known as Ivan the Terrible.

Less than a year after this
indictment was presented to the federal
court in Cleveland, the OSI received,
through the American embassy in Moscow,
a telegram, with hundred pages of
documents, which had been requested by
the OSI, in connection with another
case, a case which the OSI conducted
and lost, in the matter of Fyodor
Fedorenko.

That information that the OSI
received, also contained information
about the real identity of Ivan the
Terrible. There were four Treblinka
guards: Ivan Shevchenko, Pavel Leleko,
Alexandr Yegor, and Sergei Vasilienko,
who all stated, that the man known in
Treblinka as Ivan the Terrible, the one
that operated the gas chambers in
Treblinka, that gassed 870,000 Jews,
was one Ivan Marchenko.

I want to read to you a small part
of the statement of Vasilienko in order
to demonstrate how clearly the
evidence, which in August 1978 was
already in the hands of the OSI, showed
that Demjanjuk could not be, under any
circumstances, Ivan the Terrible.

``Marchenko Ivan, the operator of
the motor of the gas chambers in
Treblinka camp. The Jews in the work
crews called him Ivan the Terrible. He
was noted for his cruelty to the
people, during the process of their
extermination. He beat them with
obvious enjoyment, and whatever came to
his hand, however he wanted.''

Vasilienko was also presented with
a picture, of two Treblinka guards, and
was asked to tell who these two guards
were. And looking at this picture,
Vasilienko said that the picture showed
guards of the SS forces in the
Treblinka camp. He referred to one, who
is holding a pistol in his hand, as
Takchuk. Next to Takchuk was the
operator of the motor of the gas
chamber: Marchenko, Ivan.

That is to say, on the 12th of
August 1978, the OSI is in possession
of a picture of the real Ivan the
Terrible; a picture which has no
similarity whatsoever to Demjanjuk.

Now, in October 1991, due to
endless efforts by Congressman James
Trafficant (D-Ohio), the telegram was
revealed. But, the names of the people
were taken off. And, only his
persistent demand to get the entire
telegram, finally produced this
telegram, which is a clearcut proof,
that they had the statements of these
four Treblinka guards as early as 1978,

In December 1991, two months
later, another telegram was revealed.
This was a telegram that was sent by
the OSI to the Polish Main Commission,
a commission to investigate Nazi crimes
in Poland on July 29, 1981.

They say the following:

``OSI also
has several statements by Soviet
citizens, witnesses. However, since
these statements are not of public
record, because they are hidden, OSI
suggests that the Main Commission
contact the Soviet authorities directly
for these statements.''

And here is the
list of 15 testimonies; of them nine,
we know, are Treblinka guards'
testimonies, relating directly to Ivan
Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible.

Proof Beyond Doubt

One would expect the OSI to review
its position in the case, due to the
new material which they now had in
their possession, which, of course,
proved beyond any doubt that Demjanjuk
couldn't be Ivan the Terrible. The OSI
didn't do it. They also didn't
terminate the case. They decided to
continue with it, as if nothing
happened; as if this material were not
in their possession. They decided to
continue with the case, to revoke
Demjanjuk's American citizenship for
being a man [who] they knew, very well,
at this stage, that he wasn't. They
decided to proceed with the case.

But, this doesn't end the
misconduct. Towards the middle of 1979,
the OSI got additional material from
the Soviet Union. This time, we are
talking about two statements, one of a
Treblinka guard, Nikolai Malagon, and
the other from a Sobibor guard, Ignet
Donilchenko. Malagon categorically
excluded Demjanjuk as ever having set
foot in Treblinka. And specifically, he
said that this is not the face of the
person known in Treblinka as Ivan the
Terrible, the operator of the gas
chambers. And, he also specifically
named Ivan Marchenko as the real Ivan
the Terrible.

Donilchenko pointed to the same
picture all the survivors pointed to,
the picture of Demjanjuk, and said,
``This person was with me in the death
camp of Sobibor.'' It was exactly at
the very same time, that the Jewish
survivors said he was with them in
Treblinka. What the OSI has now in its
hands a clearcut alibi, because the
same face is identified to be in a
different place, more than 100 miles
away.

What did the OSI do with this
material? It didn't reveal it, not to
Demjanjuk's lawyers, and not to the
courts which later tried his case. Only
in 1986 was this material turned over
to the defense as a result of a court
order. Meanwhile, Demjanjuk had been
stripped of his American citizenship,
and extradited to the state of Israel
for being Ivan the Terrible. And, this
material was deliberately concealed
from his lawyers, and from the courts
in this country.

Towards the end of 1979, the OSI
went to Germany, to interview an SS
sergeant from Treblinka, Otto Horn, one
of the most brutal murderers in
Treblinka. We know from internal memos
which were revealed to us, years later,
that the OSI attached tremendous
importance to the fact that Demjanjuk
would be identified as Ivan the
Terrible, not only by Jewish survivors,
but by one of the SS murderers of
Treblinka. Therefore, they went to
Germany to secure the identification of
Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible, by that
SS sergeant Otto Horn, who lived in
West Berlin at the time.

On Nov. 14, 1979, Otto Horn was
interviewed by the OSI. It was a
complete failure. The OSI showed him
the picture of Demjanjuk and he failed
to identify him as Ivan the Terrible,
or even as a guard from Treblinka, or
as someone he knew from the time he
served within the SS forces.

The following day, George Garant,
one of the three OSI people who took
part in this interview (the other two
are Norman Moskovitz and Bernard
Duarte), wrote a memo describing
exactly what I just told you.

When this memo arrived at OSI
headquarters in Washington, somebody
within the OSI, we do not know who,
decided to dump this report; to not
reveal it to the defense lawyers of
Demjanjuk in the United States. In
1981, when Otto Horn testified in the
denaturalization case of Demjanjuk in
Cleveland, his defense lawyer did not
have the memorandum from 1979.

In none of the other proceedings
that took place in the United States,
up until 1986, did the defense lawyer
of Demjanjuk have this memorandum,
which undermined totally Horn's
so-called identification of Demjanjuk
as Ivan the Terrible.

Extradition to Isreal

When Demjanjuk was extradited to
the state of Israel, on February 28,
1986, the OSI told the Israeli
prosecution that they did not have the
original report of the proceedings that
took place with Otto Horn in November
1979. Instead, they produced three
affidavits, from the second half of
1986, seven years later, that described
what had happened seven years earlier,
when supposedly, Otto Horn identified
Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. So,
when Otto Horn testified in the case of
Demjanjuk in Israel, and we're talking
about a death penalty case, the defense
lawyers could not properly
cross-examine Otto Horn, because we
never had the real memorandum which
nullified the entire process of
identification.

In 1989 we received a short memo
written by Michael Wolf, then the
deputy director of the OSI. I will read
it to you: ``On July 2, 1986, Neil Sher
(Neil Sher is, then, the head of the
OSI) and I spoke to Bernie Duarte at
the American Embassy in Beirut,
Lebanon, regarding his recollections of
the photo spread procedure with Otto
Horn. Bernie stated that his
recollection of the details of the
photo spread procedure as related to
Gabby Finden (Gabby Finden is one of
the prosecution team of the state of
Israel which prosecuted Demjanjuk in
1987-88) [was] not certain. Bernie
stated that the details of the facts
given to Gabby could easily be
mistaken, but that it was his
understanding that Gabby wanted these
details, explaining at the time that he
could not be certain about the exact
sequence and the language and the words
used in the conversation with Horn.
Bernie added that since the interview
had taken place over six years ago, and
since he didn't have notes, and since
he didn't have notes of the interview,
he could not give definite chronology
of all of the comments made and actions
taken by Horn in the course of the
identification procedure.''

In other words, this Bernie Duarte
produced two affidavits in a death
penalty case, while he knows that he
doesn't remember the details, doesn't
know what he's talking about. And we
were crossing Otto Horn in a death
penalty case, without having this
document in our possession, because it
was deliberately dumped by the OSI, and
not given to the defense lawyers of
John Demjanjuk.

Of the dozens of bureaucrats at
the OSI, at this stage, one George
Parker became aware of what was
happening, and he wrote a five-page
memorandum explaining that there was no
case against Demjanjuk. Now, not only
did he write a memorandum and send it
to the head of the OSI at the time,
Alan Ryan, but he asked for a meeting
with Alan Ryan, and tried to persuade
him to drop the case. This is October
1980. The proceedings against Demjanjuk
in court had not yet started. Parker
was ignored, and the proceedings began
in February 1981.

When George Parker realized that
this was going to happen, he decided to
quit the OSI. He felt that he couldn't
take part in this frameup, on the one
hand, and coverup on the other hand. He
quit the OSI. Now, he revealed all
these facts in an interview he gave to
NBC television in November 1991, 11
years later. In this interview, he
showed the memorandum he had written 11
and a half years before. And also, he
noted that as early as 1979, internal
documents of the OSI related to Ivan
Marchenko and Nikolai Shelaiev as the
two individuals who operated the gas
chambers in Treblinka; Ivan Marchenko,
known as Ivan the Terrible. He revealed
all this in this interview to NBC in
November 1991.

However, my strong position is
that George Parker is no better, and in
some aspects even worse, than the
bureaucrats of the OSI. He wanted to
wash his hands of the execution of
Demjanjuk, but he made this thing
possible. Because, in February 1981,
when the proceedings took place, he
kept his mouth shut. He knew exactly,
he wrote a whole memorandum telling the
reasons why Demjanjuk was not Ivan the
Terrible. But his citizenship was
revoked just because he was allegedly
Ivan the Terrible. Parker knew where
the evidence was, and he kept his mouth
shut.

A Terrible Secret

February 28, 1986. Demjanjuk was
extradited to the state of Israel,
because the U.S. courts ruled that he
was Ivan the Terrible. Parker knew he
was not. Parker knew he was facing a
death penalty. He kept his mouth shut.
April 25, 1988, Demjanjuk was sentenced
to death, for one reason only--for
being Ivan the Terrible, and again
George Parker keeps his mouth shut. He
only opened his mouth in November 1991
when everything was revealed by the
defense, when we went, in September
1990, to the Soviet Union and got the
documents--80 of them--which proved
unequivocally that Ivan Marchenko was
Ivan the Terrible. He only opened his
mouth when Congressman James Trafficant
revealed publicly, the two telegrams I
was referring to before.

So, actually, when he went [on]
television, he was scared for his own
skin, and he wanted to jump on the
bandwagon, and to say, ``Look, I have
also something to tell about that
conspiracy.'' But where was he for 11
years? So, being so alert and so aware
of what's going on, and keeping your
mouth shut in such dreadful
circumstances, in my opinion, doesn't
make George Parker the only righteous
man in the sodomy of the OSI. No way.

In 1982, when the proceedings in
the denaturalization case were
completed, and the American lawyer of
Demjanjuk, John Martin, asked the OSI
to surrender to him all the evidence in
its possession from foreign countries,
specifically the Soviet Union, Poland,
West Germany, and the state of Israel,
he got the following response from
Bruce Einhorn, the lead prosecutor:

``All relevant and discoverable
documents in the government's
possession have already been made part
of the record of these proceedings. As
a result of those documents, and other
evidence, your client was
denaturalized.''

But, the worst atrocity comes when
Demjanjuk was finally extradited to the
state of Israel. A few weeks later, his
son-in-law Ed Nishnic filed a lawsuit
based on FOIA, to get the entire file,
the entire dossier about Demjanjuk,
which was in the possession of the OSI.
And we have a memo, written to Martin
Sachs, one of the trial attorneys of
the OSI, by none other than Bruce
Einhorn. And this is what he writes:

``This will confirm our discussion
regarding your request for information
concerning what the effect would be if
we were to agree to the release of our
Demjanjuk files pursuant to several
pending FOIA requests. I am familiar
with the facts of the Demjanjuk case,
because I was the lead attorney on it.
I'm also familiar with the fact that we
are currently providing judicial
assistance to the state of Israel in
their investigation and prosecution of
Demjanjuk who was extradited there this
past February. I can state
unequivocally that we should oppose
release of our files for the following
reasons: concern over the integrity of
the Israeli prosecution. Release of our
material now would in all probability
reveal, and could easily undermine and
prejudice, the Israeli prosecution
strategy.''

What is this strategy? To execute
Demjanjuk for being Ivan the Terrible!
And he doesn't want to undermine that
strategy! To hang someone, who he knows
is not that man that he's going to be
hanged for being! That's what he's
saying. Black and white, in writing.

Conversely, there is the expected
publicity that would naturally be
attached to release of certain and
often dramatic material. He knows it's
dramatic, because it shows that
Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible. And
the drama which would be created
because of the release of this
material, is no good. Therefore, it
will not be released.

A Cold-Blooded Coverup

And here we see, cold-bloodedly,
cold-bloodedly, in a death penalty case,
the OSI, as an organization, decides
not to provide the family of the
accused in these proceedings, the
exculpatory material which it has in
its possession, that could easily
undermine the strategy of his
prosecutors. I don't think a coverup
was ever proven by its perpetrators'
material so unequivocally, in writing,
black and white, as this coverup of the
OSI to execute Demjanjuk for being what
he's not. I don't think ever, in such a
blunt way, could you expose and show a
coverup as this document shows us.

But it is even worse. The OSI is
fully aware, that the defense team had
no access whatsoever to the Soviet
Union, or to Poland, where this
material in its possession is
originated from. So, the OSI was fully
aware that if they did not disclose
this material to Demjanjuk, he would
never, ever, under any circumstances be
able to get this material, because no
one could foresee in 1986, that three
and a half years, four years onwards,
the Soviet Union would collapse, and
the entire communist regimes in Eastern
Europe would collapse, as happened, and
make it possible, to get this material
ourselves. But nobody could have
anticipated this in 1986; no one.

So, by deciding to block this
material from the defense, the OSI
actually knew that there would be no
way the defense could get to this
material.

Now, usually, the perpetrators of
a coverup, especially such a cynical
one, when the facts start to emerge,
would ask forgiveness from the
Demjanjuk family. After all, by that
time, Demjanjuk was under a death
sentence. We're talking about 1991,
Demjanjuk was sentenced to death. He
was not yet cleared. He had been on
death row three years. But, no. The
only action of the OSI was to deny
responsibility for this, and the actual
perpetration of all these things.

Now, there was an enormous amount
of publicity when this coverup
exploded. The judges of the Federal
Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit,
read about all these revelations in the
newspapers. And, Judge William Merritt
decided on his own initiative, to
reopen the original extradition
proceedings of Demjanjuk to the state
of Israel. The Court appointed a
special master, Judge Thomas Wiseman,
to investigate on behalf of the Court
of Appeals, whether the extradition and
the denaturalization of Demjanjuk were
the product of fraud upon the U.S.
courts.

The 6th Circut Decision

Judge Thomas Wiseman had extensive
hearings in the second half of 1992 and
the first half of 1993, and came out
with a devastating report, on June 29,
1993. Based on this report, on November
17, 1993, the Federal Court of Appeals
for the 6th Circuit, issued their
decision. I'll read you some of the
relevant parts.

Page 4:

``As early as 1978 or
1979, the government had information
from official sources within the Soviet
Union, indicating that there were two
Ukrainian operatives of the gas chamber
at Treblinka, Ivan and Nikolai. And
that Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible,
was a man named Ivan Marchenko, not
Ivan Demjanjuk.''

Page 11:

``It seems clear that the
American courts, considering
Demjanjuk's fate, should have had those
documents that were in the OSI
possession, that pointed to Ivan
Marchenko as Ivan the Terrible.''

It continues:

``The OSI attorneys
acted with reckless disregard for their
duty to the court, and their discovery
obligations in failing to disclose at
least three sets of documents in their
possession, before the proceedings
against Demjanjuk ever reached trial.''

The court concludes:

``Thus, we
hold that the OSI attorneys acted with
reckless disregard for the truth, and
for the government obligation to take
no steps that prevent an adversary from
presenting his case fully and fairly.
This was fraud on the court in the
circumstances of this case.

``And finally, as a result of all
this, for the reasons set out herein,
we vacate the judgment of the District
court, and the judgment of this court,
in the extradition proceedings on the
grounds that the judgments were wrongly
procured, as the result of the
prosecutorial misconduct that
constituted fraud on the court.''

Black and white. The most
unequivocal terms possible.

Now, in this case, not only were
we able to prove the coverup, the
cold-blooded conspiracy, but, we also
were able to prove the motive and the
reason behind it.

On August 25, 1978, Congressman
Joshua Eilberg, then Chairman of the
House Subcommittee on Immigration,
writes a letter to Mr. Griffin Bell,
then the Attorney General of the United
States:

``Reports have reached me that the
deficiencies have become apparent in
the preparation of the case of the
United States vs. Demjanjuk, a
denaturalization proceeding against an
alleged Nazi war criminal now living in
Cleveland, Ohio. I wish to express my
strong concern over the inadequate
prosecution of the case. A repeat of
the recent Fedorenko adverse decision
to the government's case in Florida
would nullify and gravely jeopardize
the long and persistent efforts of this
subcommittee in ridding the country of
this undesirable element. The creation
of the special litigation unit, the
OSI, within the INS, was established to
bring expertise and organization to
this process. This unit should be fully
entrusted with these cases. I would
strongly argue to place the direction
of the proceedings of the Demjanjuk
case in the hands of the Special
Litigation Unit. We cannot afford the
risk of losing another decision.''

This is the 25th of August, 1978,
13 days after the OSI gets in its hands
the material that exonerates Demjanjuk.
But, because of this letter, and other
political pressures which I will refer
to later, they are afraid to come out
and say, ``We've got it all wrong;
Demjanjuk is not Ivan the Terrible.''
And, because of such a letter, and
political pressures demonstrated by
such a letter, the OSI didn't dare to
reveal the real facts about this case,
decided to dump exculpatory material,
and not reveal it; not to the courts
and not to the Demjanjuk attorneys, all
through the years.

The Sixth Circuit also addresses
this question, on page 24 of the
decision:

``Mr. Parker wrote in his 1980
memorandum that the denaturalization
case could not be dismissed because of
factors largely political, and
obviously considerable.''

Simple as
that.

Other lawyers in the OSI wrote
memos discussing this case ``as a
political hot potato,'' that if lost,
would raise political problems for
everyone, including the Attorney
General. The decision continues:

``Mr. Ryan, director of the
office, wrote to the assistant Attorney
General of the Criminal Division in
1980, that the OSI had secured the
support in Congress, Jewish community
organizations, and public at large, for
the OSI. Press coverage has been
substantially favorable and support
from Jewish organizations is now
secure. But, he went on to say, that
this support cannot be taken for
granted, and must be reinforced at
every opportunity.''

And then it concludes:

``It is
obvious from the record, that the
Office of Special Investigations, must
try and please and maintain very close
relationship with the various interest
groups, because their continued
existence depended upon it.''

So, we have the motive and the
reasons. Now, Alan Ryan himself
confirmed it. In an interview to an
Alabama newspaper, the Huntsville
Times, on October 30, 1991, Ryan said,

``It [the Demjanjuk case] was one of
the first cases we tried, and we were
very much on the line. If we had lost
that case, we probably would have had a
very short lifespan.''

In other words, in order to
prolong the lifespan of the OSI, they
chose to shorten the lifespan of
Demjanjuk!

Five minutes after Demjanjuk was
acquitted, Janet Reno, the Attorney
General of the United States, was asked
to comment. We are talking about a man
who spent seven years, six months, and
21 days in prison in Israel for being
what he's not, because of the Justice
Department that Janet Reno heads. Now,
she didn't have one word of criticism
about the organization she's in charge
of. The only thing she said is that the
Justice Department would do everything
in its power, to prevent the return of
Demjanjuk to the United States.
Fortunately enough, her power is not
limitless, and four days later, the
same Sixth Circuit again reconvened,
and ordered the immediate return of
Demjanjuk to the United States.

When that same Sixth Circuit said
that the Justice Department, through
the OSI, had committed a fraud upon the
court, which almost led to the
execution of an innocent person, she
again was asked to comment. The only
thing she had to say was, that she
would try to appeal the 6th Circuit
decision to the Supreme Court, which
she did. The Supreme Court refused to
even certify the case. No
investigation, nothing has been done
since then by anybody in this country;
no government body, not the U.S.
Congress or any other body within the
government of the United States, has
moved to investigate, let alone to
actually prosecute. Why not? The
activity of those who are responsible
for this terrible travesty, didn't end
with the case of Demjanjuk.

The preceding article is a rough version of the article that appeared in
The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New
Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The
New Federalist, and The American Almanac